Meine Mutter.

I had this whole post written out about how awesome last weekend was (the beach, shopping, more shopping, alcohol, pony), but now that it's this weekend, I feel like I missed that opportunity. Whoops.

These are my pale thighs on the beach. Surprisingly no tattoos in this image.

So here's where we are. Three day weekend. I'm hoping for lots of pony time, starting this afternoon. We'll be on our second of three sets of twelve-minutes of trotting, which is ridiculously close to canter work. In quick succession, I've had one barnmate treat me like I had lost my mind for taking so long to work him up. And another barnmate just fucking got it. Probably because she moved across the country to feed her horse better grass. (for real)

This grass.

I've turned down a tentative opportunity to take Archie to the beach. It's one of those things that would be great if it actually happens, but I don't know that it will. I just don't feel like he's ready for that much work on hard sand. Meh.

In other news, C is moving in a couple months. First, it was one city and I had a lot of help getting her set up with good contacts (thank you!). Then she came to me and said that her orders had changed and she's moving to my hometown. I put her in contact with my old barn manager, for whom I worked, and now she'll be moving to that barn and feeding. I feel like, thanks to my personal connections and the existence of nice people in the blogger world, she could have told me any city in the US and maybe Canada and I could have given her at least one reference.

And, finally, my mom sent a text asking if she could spend the night on the way to see my brothers in Florida. In exchange, she had to come out to the barn with me. It might have been a little mean, but she seemed to enjoy seeing her "grandson". He wasn't sure of her and I was super anxious about those open shoes (because equestrians with barefeet have an innate food swiftness, right?), but she won him over with treats. Allllso. She left her cutting machine with me while she's gone. Oh, yes.

I've been trying to stay away from computer (I took some leave, uh, so my dr wouldn't give me a bad grade, so it was a 5 day weekend, but don't get too jealous, it took two days to be able to move again) -- but I LOVE the photo of Archie hiding behind the post, ROFL. Cantering???? Yesssss!

There's actually awesome grass at the barn right now, except for in my horses' paddock. :( I do graze them every night though and I'm pretty sure people think I'm a bit crazy for doing that...I love your mom's face in the photo with Archie. My dad loves to come to the barn but both of my parents are very partial to Phoenix (read the good grandhorse). Stampede's showing antics (read when my parents usually see him ridden) have not made a good impression. Although he was good the last time they saw him show finally, lol.